Archives for March 2015

Before her senior year, Katie Holmes had never been to Nashville. When she arrived, a few weeks after graduation, she didn’t know anyone within a 100-mile radius. She had no job, no friends, no sense of what might come next.

You expect this story from an upstart musician looking to make it big—a starry-eyed teenager from small town America who arrives with nothing but a guitar. Outside of some shower singing, however, Holmes had never been much of a performer. She was a soft-spoken art history and psychology major. Instead of striving to become the next big thing, Holmes was hoping to find a role in the background.

Two weeks after her journey south, Holmes was offered a job as a project manager with a record label/marketing firm. She leapt at the offer and has not looked back.

Two years later, Holmes is at home in Nashville, working alongside some of her favorite artists and attending multiple concerts a week.

I caught up with Holmes to hear about her journey into the music world and to learn about the ups and downs associated with creating a life in a new city.

Ever since I was a little kid, I always wanted to be able to dunk a basketball. That drove an interest in sports performance and that interest grew and grew throughout high school and college. All of my internships were sports performance related. Working with the teams and individual athletes at Williams and the strength coach there built upon itself to the point that when I graduated, I knew I wanted to go into sports performance.

When I went to Williams, I thought that I wanted to end up working for a team, but during my freshmen year, I realized that I wanted to run my own gym.

I took a job after graduation at a gym in Connecticut, but the company went out of business right before I was due to start. When that fell through, I moved back home to Wisconsin. I had nothing in front of me and didn’t know what my next step might be. Throughout the time, I’d been talking with Chris Shalvoy ’08 who had hosted me on my recruiting trip at Williams and had been one of my best friends. He was attending law school at Northwestern. Chris told me, ‘why don’t you come to Chicago? There are a lot of gyms here. We can set up some interviews, and you can figure it out from there.’

Charlie Cates was never your ordinary kid. An avid basketball player, in high school Cates routinely woke up at 5 a.m. to shoot hoops before classes started. In college, he rose at 5:45, exercised 4-5 hours a day, and consumed a daily intake of 8,000-10,000 calories. The motivation for his pursuits came from within. He would latch onto a goal—dunking a basketball, making the starting lineup, becoming a college player—and devote himself fully to the pursuit of that goal.

Aware that no amount of hard work was going to transform him into an NBA talent, Cates transitioned his focus during college from training himself to training others. He found that he loved the work, and midway through his freshman year, Cates had a new goal: open his own gym. Following graduation, Cates attacked that goal with the same dedication that typified his earlier pursuits. After years of long hours, including a nine-month stretch where he only slept 3 hours a night, Cates accomplished his goal and moved into his own gym early last fall.

His story illustrates how hard work and dedication can help you achieve the extraordinary.

Cates’ days as a trainer actually began before Williams. In high school, he became the unofficial strength coach of his brother’s basketball team, organizing hill sprints in the summer and weight lifting sessions in the winter.

“When I went to Williams, I thought that I wanted to end up working for a team, but during my freshman year, I realized that I wanted to run my own gym. I was sitting in Greylock dining hall for lunch, and the idea came to me. By the end of that lunch period, I had worked out a whole fantasy in my head of what I wanted to do.”

Michael Wynn paused, arms extended, waiting for the next order telling him to lower his body to the floor. He had survived his plebe year at the US Naval Academy, but graduation was still a long way off. Like most of his class, Wynn had arrived at Navy convinced that aviation was the only path for him. The movie Top Gun had come out two years before, and every Navy recruit was lining up to become the next Maverick.

As he dropped again and strained to raise his body off the floor, the upperclassmen hovering over him suggested a new path. Wynn was a short ex-wrestler with bad eyes. He stood little chance of winning the ultra competitive race for aviation. Instead, the upperclassmen told him, his background as a boy scout made him perfect for the Marines.

Aware of the fact that life commanding 12 grunts required more communication training, Wynn switched his major from the sciences to English. Shortly after that, he went home to Pittsfield, took some courses at Berkshire Community College, and transferred to Williams to focus more fully on the liberal arts.

After an injury ended his military career and poor eyesight kept him out of the federal law enforcement agencies, Wynn settled on a career as a police officer in his hometown. Fourteen years after his college graduation, Wynn became one of the youngest police chiefs in Pittsfield history.

I met up with Wynn in his Pittsfield office to learn about his journey into law enforcement and day-to-day life as a cop.